The Shirt On His Back Read online

  ‘See here – January, isn’t it?’

  ‘You can make it Ben – Your Lordship.’

  ‘Not “My Lordship” just yet, thank God; Bill will do. The Company’s holding a feast in Jim Bridger’s honor tomorrow night, and I meant to ask Sefton if he’d favor us – do you play anything besides piano? You must—’

  ‘You didn’t bring one?’

  Stewart smote his forehead theatrically, making all the long fringes of his white buckskin jacket flutter. ‘Dash it, I knew I was forgetting something!’

  ‘I’m sure if you ask around the camp, someone will have one,’ said January comfortingly. ‘Or, if that isn’t the case, I’m fair on the guitar.’

  ‘Excellent! One of the Taos traders usually has one. Or perhaps that fellow Wynne from Philadelphia . . . Heaven knows he has every other sort of useless thing for sale. Could I induce you and Sefton to come down and play for us? Bring the lovely Mrs Sefton as well. I know the chief of her village has been asked, and – damn it!’ he added and, turning, strode across the path to where Jed Blankenship, far from approaching La Princessa or Irish Mary (Veinte-y-Cinco having disappeared with another customer), had gone over to Pia, Veinte-y-Cinco’s thirteen-year-old daughter, who ran errands for Seaholly’s and worked behind the bar. The yellow-bearded trapper had the girl by the arm, and Pia was pulling back, not fear in her face but a child’s disgust at adult stupidity.

  ‘For God’s sake, Blankenship—’ Seaholly came around the bar as January, Stewart and several other men crossed the path. Blankenship – who’d had several drinks already – turned to Seaholly, thrust toward him a handful of credit-plews of various companies at the rendezvous and snarled, ‘Waugh! You want a cut of every piece of commodity in this camp?’

  The Reverend William Grey – at his usual stand next to the liquor tent – waved his Bible and thundered, ‘Generation of serpents! You are as fed horses in the morning, neighing after whoredoms and strong drink! Woe unto you!’

  More expeditiously, the trapper Kit Carson seized Blankenship by one shoulder, whirled him around and knocked him sprawling. As he lay on the ground, Moccasin Woman – the gentle, gray-haired woman of the small tribe of the Company’s Delaware scouts – stepped out of the crowd and kicked him.

  ‘As I said,’ declared Stewart contentedly, ‘the Laws of Nature will take their course. It’s what I love about this land, January. The very lack of human law brings out what is essential in Man – what each man is in his heart. And it’s comforting to find that so much of it is good.’

  January opened his mouth to ask whether the Good lay in the fact that men would object to injury to a child – the girl Blankenship had tried to rape two days ago on the river bank had been barely two years older than Pia, and no one besides himself and Manitou had interfered – or injury to a girl who was more or less white. But his job, he reminded himself, was to befriend as many potential informants as possible – and to put himself in a position to receive whatever gossip was going – not to have any opinions of his own.

  So he only shook his head, sighed and asked, ‘Where’s Blezy Picard when we need him?’

  FIVE

  The clouds gathering over the Gros Ventre mountains to the north swept down the valley that night, unleashing a torrent of wind and a succession of short-lived cloudbursts that rattled on the skins of Morning Star’s lodge like the hoof-beats of a passing stampede. The bags of pemmican, the bullet pouches and powder horns that hung from the lodge poles swayed gently in the glow of the embers, and the poles themselves creaked as they rocked, as if the lodge itself were a living thing, dreaming of flight. January was twice wakened by lightning, huge blue-white explosions that shone through the semi-translucent skins: when he went outside, wind flowed down around him, and he could hear the river roaring in spate, all the cottonwoods stirred to a rushing tumult nearly as loud. Another bolt flashed almost overhead, and by it he had a startling vision of a river of cloud pouring past above him, close enough, it seemed, that he could reach up and put his hands in it, before purple-black darkness slammed down again.

  Rose would love this, he thought as he groped his way back into the tent again, found his blankets by the tiny whisper of the fire. Rose reveled in lightning and storms. How can I note this in that little book? Why can’t I fold up the night, the air, the lightning and the soft creak of the lodge poles into a little packet to store in my pocket, to unfold for her when I come home?

  If I come home.

  If she’s alive when I get there . . .

  From beneath the bundled jacket under his head he drew his blue-beaded rosary with its cheap steel cross, counted the beads with grim concentration. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee . . .

  Let her be there when I return. Don’t let me lose everything twice . . .

  In the morning Robbie Prideaux and his dog Tuck joined them at their breakfast fire in front of the lodge, with the news that, on the strength of a rumor that Clem Groot and Goshen ‘Beauty’ Clarke were going to sneak out of the camp under cover of the storm, half the trappers and camp-setters in the valley had stationed themselves in the woods and the hills on both sides of the river, with the result that at least twenty men were now stranded on the far side of the Green, waiting for the torrent to go down.

  Morning Star cried in triumph, ‘Bien, alors! We will make a fortune, Sun Mouse!’ – for she, Clopard, and one of her sisters had spent the previous day fashioning a canoe. ‘Nevertheless,’ she added, scooping into her wooden mortar another handful of dried elk meat to pound up, ‘they are lucky, those across the river, to survive the night. The Blackfeet are camped up the draws there –’ she nodded across the green-brown flood, toward the hills that loomed beyond – ‘and they watch for those who are so foolish as to hunt alone.’

  All the way across the plains January had heard about the Blackfeet, a powerful tribe engaged in permanent war with almost every other Indian nation west of the frontier. In general the Blackfeet refused to have dealings with either the American trading companies or the British, acquiring guns and powder through raiding and theft more than by trade, feared by all and watching the slow encroachment upon their territory with angry eyes.

  ‘My mother’s brother Owl was killed by Blackfeet,’ added Morning Star quietly. ‘They chopped through his back on both sides of his spine and pulled his ribs out, so that his lungs collapsed. This was after they drove splinters of fatwood – resin pine – under his skin all over his body, then threw him on the fire. It took him two days to die.’ Her small hands stilled on the stone pestle, and her brows pulled together over her aquiline nose. ‘Owl was a strong man. They still sing songs about him. I’m glad they keep to their own side of the river, mostly—’

  ‘Mostly?’ Hannibal’s eyebrows raised a whole ladder of startled little wrinkles up to his hairline. ‘Did I hear you utter the fatal word mostly, o dove of the rocky places?’

  She made a gesture at him, as if shooing flies, but January saw her smile.

  ‘Chased By Bears, and Faces The Wind – my other brother – tell me they’ve seen signs of Blackfeet on this side of the river, but those aren’t the ones they’re worried about.’ She shrugged. ‘In the villages they say that there is another band in the mountains north of here, and no one knows who they are. Faces The Wind says there are at least twice as many of them as there are of the Blackfeet; eighty lodges, he thinks. Chased By Bears thinks they may be Crow, who have quarreled with the Company’s Crow and won’t come into the camp on account of it. But Moccasin Woman says no, they are Flatheads . . . But if they are Flatheads, why are they not camped with the traders of Hudson’s Bay? But there are a lot of them,’ she concluded and resumed her steady pounding. ‘And they take great care not to be seen.’

  ‘Any chance they’ll attack the camp?’ asked January, after a moment’s mental computation of how many warriors generally slept in one lodge – anywhere from five to nine, as a general rule. He did not much like the number he came up with.
r />   Gil Wallach, sopping up cornbread and stew on the other side of the fire, shook his head. ‘Indians may have rifles, but they’ve seldom got the powder and ball to sustain an attack,’ he said. ‘It’s why they fight the way they do. They need that ammunition for hunting. And, even if the Crow wanted to come down on us for some reason, there’s enough other tribes that want to preserve us – as a source of powder, ball, vermillion, steel knives, an’ what-have-you – that they’d be mightily pissed at the Crows for upsettin’ the apple cart.’

  ‘There’s the Law of Nature for Captain Stewart,’ mused Hannibal. ‘Either simple acquisitiveness for the fruits of decadent Civilization . . . or the fact that the neighbors may be watching.’

  ‘Which don’t say anythin’,’ put in Shaw softly, ‘about smaller groups – either them or the Blackfeet – comin’ into the camp, when they think nobody’s lookin’, an’ pickin’ off a few here an’ there.’

  ‘And on the subject of the fruits of decadent Civilization . . .’ Hannibal nodded toward the footpath that led toward the main trail as Edwin Titus, Controller of the AFC camp, appeared around the screen of scrubby rabbitbrush that bordered the Ivy and Wallach pitch.

  Titus was a big man, bland-faced, frock-coated, and despite a tidy Quaker beard and the pomade he wore on his hair there was nothing in him of the weakness that trappers usually saw in citified Easterners. The trappers loved to boast of how their farts and sneezes could send lesser mortals like Mexicans and niggers (‘Present company excepted, Ben . . .’) fleeing in terror, but they walked quietly around Titus. There was a deadly quality even to his geniality – he’d lost no time in offering January a job with the Company the previous afternoon, the moment Gil Wallach was out of hearing: a hundred and twenty dollars a year, to clerk at their St Louis offices – and at the AFC store tent, effective immediately. ‘You know Ivy and Wallach aren’t going to last the year,’ he’d said with his wide, impersonal smile. January guessed this to be true – the AFC was mercilessly undercutting the prices of every independent trader in the camp. ‘They’re losing money in that little fort of theirs—’

  ‘I didn’t know that, sir.’ And YOU wouldn’t know it either, unless you had someone IN that fort sending you reports . . .

  Unless, of course, you’re simply making that up.

  Titus had shrugged. ‘It’s not something they’d tell a man they’d just hired. But if you think your loyalty now is going to mean there’ll be work for you when you get back to the settlements, you may find yourself left standing.’

  Later January had learned that Shaw, too, had been approached – ‘Only, he offered me a fifty-dollar bonus if I’d bring some skins with me when I come. An’ he sort of implied that he took my refusin’ in bad part.’

  Bad part or not, Titus was all smiles today. Possibly – January learned later – because he’d just hired the small trader Pete Sharpless’s clerk away from him, leaving the Missourian to do all his camp-work himself. Titus complimented Hannibal on his marriage, said he much looked forward to hearing the two musicians play at the banquet in Bridger’s honor that evening (just as if Jim ‘Gabe’ Bridger, now a Company employee, had not come very close to being scalped by Indian allies of the AFC while he was still leading brigades for the now-defunct Rocky Mountain outfit), and invited Gil Wallach and Abishag Shaw to the festivities as well.

  ‘He planning to poison you?’ asked Hannibal interestedly, when the Controller had taken his leave, and Wallach laughed.

  ‘He’d do it if he could figure out a way not to kill half his allies in the process,’ the little ex-trapper said. ‘No, I rode with Old Gabe in ’32, up in the Beaverhead Mountains. I’m guessing he’s asked all his old compadres to this fandango tonight. And I’m guessing, too, Titus invited every trader in the camp, up to and includin’ John McLeod of Hudson’s Bay – though it’ll choke him on Captain Stewart’s foie gras, to look down on us all sittin’ there drinkin’ his liquor.’ And he grinned to himself at the thought as he got to his feet and headed up the path to open the store.

  ‘Be that all as it may,’ remarked Shaw quietly, uncoiling his tall height to follow, ‘it’ll give us a chance to look over the camp an’ see who it couldn’t be.’

  ‘It would help,’ said January that evening as they set out on foot down the trampled pathway toward the AFC camp, ‘if your brother were just a little more observant – or if Boden had something convenient like a deformed ear or a broken nose or a mole on his chin. Or one blue eye and one brown eye, like the villains in novels. Because medium height, medium build, brown hair and beard, brown eyes, straight nose could be a description of Hannibal ten years ago. Or Jim Bridger. Or the pilot of the steamboat we took up the Missouri – how old is Boden?’

  ‘’Bout thirty-five. Tom’s age. Old for the mountains.’

  Killin’ bad, Johnny had told his brother. But having seen, in the past three days, what the camp considered not much worth bothering about – including Blezy Picard accidentally murdering Ty Farrell, Jed and Blezy attempting to rape an Indian girl, and three of the Mexican trader Byron de la Vega’s engagés driving a grizzly bear from the woods through the Hudson’s Bay camp for a joke – January guessed that whatever it was, it involved more than just shooting someone from behind a tree.

  And in fact, no man in the camp would be discomposed by being shot at from behind a tree, anyway. Earlier that afternoon, one of Robbie Prideaux’s friends had shot his hat off just to see him jump, which he hadn’t.

  ‘I’m guessin’,’ went on Shaw after a time, ‘that Boden’s either passin’ as a trader hisself, or clerkin’ for the Company or for McLeod of Hudson’s Bay – dependin’ on what him an’ this Hepplewhite between ’em had planned. Hepplewhite sounds good an’ British anyhow . . . but so does Shaw. An’ for all what Tom says about shootin’ him dead first chance I get, I can’t turn my back on it, that he’s got at least one partner in this an’ maybe more. Maybe lots more.’ He spoke softly, though behind them, Wallach and Hannibal were joking in French with Morning Star and her sisters, Sioux girls tall and slim as willow trees with feathers braided in their straight, midnight hair.

  ‘Tom give me a page of Boden’s handwritin’. Beyond that, if’fn you come up with any good way of tellin’ for sure who it is, Maestro, I surely hope you’ll share it. Last thing anybody needs around here is somebody killin’ an innocent man they think is the one they’s after, only it turns out later he ain’t. I had that up to my hairline in Kentucky.’

  Five or six of the AFC’s spare shelters had been set up on the bare space of the contest ground opposite the liquor tent, far enough back that the AFC camp-setters could turn aside any uninvited drinkers who might mix up one tent for another in their befuddlement. Cressets of burning wood blazed around it, and three campfires formed an island of brightness just outside. January could see as they neared that candle lanterns hung from the tent frames within.

  And if I had a Gilbert Stuart portrait of Frank Boden rolled up in my pocket, he reflected dourly, I wouldn’t be able to make out his face in there, no matter what he currently looks like.

  Voices hailed Gil Wallach: John McLeod – the jovial chief of the Hudson’s Bay camp, who was, unusually for a trader, bearded like a holly bush – crossed the path, resplendent in a long-tailed violet coat the like of which hadn’t been seen in public since Jefferson was President. There was a deal of rough good-natured pushing, jokes about what they’d been up to, exclamations of ‘Waugh!’ and ‘Waugh yourself, Yank!’ in McLeod’s rich Scots voice. Like Sir William, McLeod had seen service in His Majesty’s forces, and his presence in the camp was a reminder that Britain’s king still claimed ownership of these lands.

  Other men emerged from the dimly-glowing golden box that was Seaholly’s tent: Flatheads who had been trading partners of the HBC for generations, wearing blue British sailors’ jackets with brass buttons that winked in the firelight, and the handful of Mexican traders in black-laced coats of yellow and red. Independent trappers, too
, including Goshen ‘Beauty’ Clarke – goldenly handsome as his nickname attested – and his partner Clem Groot, the squat Dutchman, chuckling over last night’s ruse and the dumb coons who’d spent the night out in the rain on their account.

  To newcomer Charro Morales’s admonition that the dumb coons in question were damn lucky they hadn’t encountered the Blackfeet, rose a dozen protestations of how many Blackfeet each of the various independents could take on single-handedly: Waugh!

  Ribs and haunches of elk and mountain sheep dripped over the coals of the three fires, along with skewers of appolos, that delicacy of fat meat spitted alternately with lean. Since coming to the frontier, January had been almost constantly hungry, the result – he had noted for Rose’s sake – of a diet that consisted almost entirely of lean meat. In addition to these viands, the AFC cooks had turned out pots of stew, rice, and cornbread, enlivened with the more exotic fare Sir William Stewart had packed along: pickles, sugar, strawberry jam and Stilton cheese, brandied peaches and potted French pâte, as well as port and cognac. Someone had clearly paid Charro Morales’s prices for liquor also, because the whiskey that was going around among the commonality – while barely up to the worst New Orleans standards – was still better than anything on offer at Seaholly’s, and when Hannibal entered the orange-lit murk of the tent with his fiddle, there was a general shout of joy. ‘We gonna see some prancin’!’

  Around the entrance, the Crows who worked for the AFC were already gorging themselves on the meat and passing around tin cups of Company liquor. Wallach muttered, ‘Titus better watch how much of that stuff’s goin’ out, if he don’t want there to be trouble.’ Red Arm, the chief of the Crows, sat inside, between Titus and Sir William at the back of the tent, and glared derisively at McLeod’s companion, the Flathead chief Kills At Night.

  Among the independent trappers the talk was all of beaver and trade and the damn settlers comin’ over the passes like damn idiots, and whether Montreal traps were or were not superior to the St Louis design, and how soon do you think the government’s going to kick the damn British out of the Columbia country and let us take what it’s our right to take? In between this, January would occasionally whisper to Gil Wallach to identify this man or that. (‘That’s Byron de La Vega, that was at Pierre’s Hole in ’32 when they had that fight with the Blackfoot . . . That feller? Wiegand – been clerkin’ for the Company forever. You know that shirt I got, with the quill embroidery on the front? His squaw quilled that for me . . . No, I never seen that coon before but I hear tell his name’s Wynne an’ he can’t shoot for sour owl shit . . .’) The noise outside the tent, where the Indian allies of the two fur-trade companies had begun to howl and dance, was even worse.